Advice on Raspberry pi hardware for running full BTC node

[DaveF]

A couple days ago I came across myNode which seems to be a working open source solution to running a full node on RPi4 along with many other apps including lighting node/wallet and BTC explorer apps. I'll be dropping the idea of compiling a node on raspian and looking forward to getting this up and running. 

Looks interesting. I am downloading the VM image now. If it looks nice I'll put together another RPi setup with an SSD to see how it goes.

-Dave

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[WHIZZ718]

An opinion from someone who did once have a bitcoin full node on a 32 bit rPi quad core with a 64GB usb memory stick plugged in.

DON'T

That was years ago, when the blockchain was less than 50GB and where I live took about two to four days (100 hours) to sort itself out, and then two to six restarts, resynchs, unexplained halts ... whether on my best PC or the scrapheap duel core or an rPi made no difference - probability of ending up with a full node here was never better than 1/4, and expected time before it conked out was never better than a few weeks.

Presently I don't even have a full node running, and I'm usually a try-hard who'll set it up and go through half a dozen resynchs just because I want bitcoin full nodes to still belong to everyone.

On an rPi with latest raspbian, which must have python-3.7-dev and a few other things, a better bet to have your own bitcoins at home is (tentatively) electrum.
That way, you can completely trash your experimental installation and always recover your bitcoins because plenty of full nodes supply pruned blockchain info, to any new Electrum client, so that will recognise your stupid poem which you wrote down on paper somewhere safe.  That is probably more malware-proof and upgrade-proof than copying around wallet.dat files which do not always work on slightly different full node versions.

All is not lost.  There is a fairly low value toycoin called Mazacoin whose blockchain is only a few GB, so is better suited to raspberry pi full nodes than the mainchain Bitcoin.  I had much better luck running a full node for mazacoin on a raspberry pi, a few years back when those ones were traded on more of the altcoin exchanges.  You might find a few other altcoins, but beware of ones whose algorithm was designed to need particular chip architecture which the pi does not have, or whose mission goal is something abhorrent or unlawful.  See for example URO.  I found sha256d coins to be preferable for raspberry pi full nodes.  One can learn much with altcoin(s), at much lower initial investment of money and time in computer hardware.

I wonder what hardware requirements for a full node are this year ?  Four years ago, I noted that bitcoin was not too greedy with memory, definitely needed a 2 core not single cpu, and that it still took all week on the 4 core PC.
Please let us know here if you get to a full node synched up.  I've not tried this years' 64 bit rPi4, as it has continued the tradition of not working with last years' power supply.   

[DaveF]

An opinion from someone who did once have a bitcoin full node on a 32 bit rPi quad core with a 64GB usb memory stick plugged in.

DON'T

--snip--

If you read through the thread you can see that it can be done. And is being done.
As of this posting I have

1) raspiblitz on a RPi4 [ 03400a67375da5d5d04dd59514452ce9f0cadb2fbec65863073897d52843b61c80@24.45.24.105:9735 ]
2) full node on a RPi3
3) full node with lnd on a RPi3

The biggest issues are still crap power supplies and slow drives. (Just get a good USB SSD and be done)

Yeah, for the time and effort involved you can get a few generations out old micro PC and be done.
This is more fun / more of a challenge can I do it.

-Dave

[philipma1957]

An opinion from someone who did once have a bitcoin full node on a 32 bit rPi quad core with a 64GB usb memory stick plugged in.

DON'T

--snip--

If you read through the thread you can see that it can be done. And is being done.
As of this posting I have

1) raspiblitz on a RPi4 [ 03400a67375da5d5d04dd59514452ce9f0cadb2fbec65863073897d52843b61c80@24.45.24.105:9735 ]
2) full node on a RPi3
3) full node with lnd on a RPi3

The biggest issues are still crap power supplies and slow drives. (Just get a good USB SSD and be done)

Yeah, for the time and effort involved you can get a few generations out old micro PC and be done.
This is more fun / more of a challenge can I do it.

-Dave

yeah you can buy this

 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-M92p-Tiny-SFF-PC-Core-i5-3470T-2-9GHz-8GB-320GB-HDD-Win-10-Pro-AC-Adapter/233498462202?

and this

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-SSD-PLUS-Internal-SDSSDA-1T00-G26/dp/B07D998212/ref=sr_1_3?


and be done with it.


backup via a cloned hdd.

real easy peasy.

[ABCbits]

So i've finished download .ova image from https://mynodebtc.com/ and just tried it a bit.

1. By default it asks 4 processor, 4 GB RAM & 27 MB video memory
2. If you use VirtualBox, you need to install VM VirtualBox Extension Pack
3. Guest Additions isn't installed by default, so you must install it by yourself (i haven't tried it yet).
4. myNode uses Debian 10 64-bit with OpenBox desktop environment
5. The default credentials is

Username: admin
Password: bolt 

6. I don't need to configure anything, but if you need to configure anything (e.g. import Blockchain from your synced node or use Tor), you can't do it from their Web UI and must do it manually.
7. I saw Docker and Fail2Ban installed, even though there aren't images on Docker

For now it looks promising, i'll try it later when i'm not too lazy to configure it.

[Icygreen]

Nice, glad to see you've got it running. I'm having a tough time understanding this on a Rpi4
I've flashed the image to the SD card and plugged in the HD.
I'm stuck at the next set of instructions:

Once it's powered, visit http://mynode.local/ or http://mynode_ip_address/ in a web browser on your PC, laptop or phone. The myNode device runs a webserver, so to connect to it's GUI, you use a browser on a different device.

As far as I'm aware, myNode does not have an ip address yet as it's never been connected to the internet. Does this require a LAN cable connection? Or can I edit some file to connect to my wifi?
All I have is a blue screen with 'no signal' from the device. 
Appreciate helping me understand.

[philipma1957]

Nice, glad to see you've got it running. I'm having a tough time understanding this on a Rpi4
I've flashed the image to the SD card and plugged in the HD.
I'm stuck at the next set of instructions:

Once it's powered, visit http://mynode.local/ or http://mynode_ip_address/ in a web browser on your PC, laptop or phone. The myNode device runs a webserver, so to connect to it's GUI, you use a browser on a different device.

As far as I'm aware, myNode does not have an ip address yet as it's never been connected to the internet. Does this require a LAN cable connection? Or can I edit some file to connect to my wifi?
All I have is a blue screen with 'no signal' from the device. 
Appreciate helping me understand.

I would use a eth cable from the rasp pi to your router.

I would look for the rasp pi   with an ip search  like advanced ip using a regular pc and windows or linux


https://www.advanced-ip-scanner.com/    like for the scanner.


I am not anti wifi but  you will be doing a long download to the rasp pi so  an eth cable is more stable for a long download.


good luck.

[DaveF]

Nice, glad to see you've got it running. I'm having a tough time understanding this on a Rpi4
I've flashed the image to the SD card and plugged in the HD.
I'm stuck at the next set of instructions:

Once it's powered, visit http://mynode.local/ or http://mynode_ip_address/ in a web browser on your PC, laptop or phone. The myNode device runs a webserver, so to connect to it's GUI, you use a browser on a different device.

As far as I'm aware, myNode does not have an ip address yet as it's never been connected to the internet. Does this require a LAN cable connection? Or can I edit some file to connect to my wifi?
All I have is a blue screen with 'no signal' from the device. 
Appreciate helping me understand.

What philipma1957 said.
Use a cable not Wi-Fi
There is 1 driver that would have to come with it to use the wired nic since all of of them are the same.
There are many more Wi-Fi drivers that would need to be setup if you wanted it to work out of the box.
Not to mention you would need a way to set the SSID and any credentials.

The VM I downloaded yesterday is still syncing. I'm @ block 501514 after about 24 hours.
This is on my laptop just doing a normal sync with nothing configured. Wanted to do a clean test.

-Dave

[DaveF]

That's pretty fast, looks like you're using quick mode rather than true full node according to mynodebtc.com/guide/sync_bitcoin_independently

Probably but there are a bunch of full nodes on the lan that it is on so it might just be sucking it down quickly.
It's a decent machine with SSDs so I'm not sure how it was pulling it. Quick mode shows error now so I don't know if was or not without going through the logs.

-Dave

[Icygreen]

Ok, I've got the ethernet cable connected from the router but I can't find the device using the advanced IP scanner.   I can see the router and other devices such as phones and computers on the wifi network but not the device connected to the eth port.   What am I missing here?  I have access to the router login creds but cant seem to locate any device info there. I can see packets being sent and received on the eth port, just can't find the ip address of the Pi.  Using windows
Have Zenmap but not sure how to use it

[Icygreen]

Ok, I've got the ethernet cable connected from the router but I can't find the device using the advanced IP scanner.   I can see the router and other devices such as phones and computers on the wifi network but not the device connected to the eth port.   What am I missing here?  I have access to the router login creds but cant seem to locate any device info there. I can see packets being sent and received on the eth port, just can't find the ip address of the Pi.  Using windows

It's weird if you can't find IP of your Raspberry Pi if you have access to the router. How about write list of all IP, then plug the Ethernet cable to your Pi to find the IP instead?

If there aren't many devices connected, i'd try enter each IP to my browser instead since http://mynodebtc.com/guide/getting_started mention you can access myNode web UI immediately after you power-on the device.

Tried that, only 6 devices including the router.  None besides the router return a web UI.
My router does not display any details to devices that I can see, possible I'm not looking in the right place though. Now messing around with nmap (zenmap) but not sure how to use it really.
I've even reflashed the memory card to make sure it wasn't corrupted.
Sigh...
Edit: I'm thinking it may have something to do with the router. Shows wireless devices but not wired devices.

[Carlton Banks]

Edit: I'm thinking it may have something to do with the router. Shows wireless devices but not wired devices.

you can confirm this by using the ethernet port of a device that you know is working over wifi, as the other possibility is that the image file you downloaded is broken somehow

tbh, you're better off with Raspbian, as the maximum number of people will know how to help you (Raspbian is probably most popular OS image for Raspis, whereas this myNode software most certainly isn't)

[Icygreen]

Edit: I'm thinking it may have something to do with the router. Shows wireless devices but not wired devices.

you can confirm this by using the ethernet port of a device that you know is working over wifi, as the other possibility is that the image file you downloaded is broken somehow

tbh, you're better off with Raspbian, as the maximum number of people will know how to help you (Raspbian is probably most popular OS image for Raspis, whereas this myNode software most certainly isn't)

Must be something with the router, Tried with my laptop which works over wifi but does not work over any of the eth ports. I'll call support.

[DaveF]

Edit: I'm thinking it may have something to do with the router. Shows wireless devices but not wired devices.

Some (very very few but some) routers have the Wi-Fi and hard wired networks separate.
It's supposed to be some form of "security"
Make sure that there is no obscure setting somewhere in the router to keep them separate. I have not seen it in a while but there were a few that did it.

-Dave

[philipma1957]

to give some benchmarks on a high-end beast pc .

I downloaded full node in six hours last night.

Did it with a ryzen 9 3900x cpu and a 2tb m2 nvme gen 4 hard drive.

along with 16gb ram and a 200mb internet connection.

a computer like mine is around 2000 to,build.

i suspect my bottleneck is my eth  connection.

it does illustrate that full nodes are pretty hard to download quickly.

i think i could do it it quicker and spend less but a really fast download under four hours is tough if not impossible.

i knock the rasp pi but if you create a working 1 tb ssd for your rasp pi and clone it once a week. you would save a ton of money.

is it possible to run a rasp pi in a vm on a high end pc just to make a full node quickly then clone it to an ssd and use that with the rasp Pi.

[DaveF]

So the mynode VM finished the download and now I have it working on the other stuff (electrum server and such)
Seems like a nice GUI wrapper for all the stuff that you would have to CLI for.

The update process if you do not have the paid version seems a bit cumbersome. Once everything it done and synced I will make a backup of the virtual drives and see how well it works.

-Dave

[Dabs]

I think just copy the blockchain files from a full node PC to the rasp pi should work.

[philipma1957]

I think just copy the blockchain files from a full node PC to the rasp pi should work.

yeah  I would think so  that seems to be fastest way to do it.

[fillippone]

I think just copy the blockchain files from a full node PC to the rasp pi should work.

yeah  I would think so  that seems to be fastest way to do it.

Absolutely.
This is what Stadicus suggested on his guide Raspibolt.
Just read here:
https://github.com/Stadicus/RaspiBolt/blob/1.0/raspibolt_50_mainnet.md

[DaveF]

For bitcoin itself you can usually just copy the files. I have at times had issues with permissions but that is usually just a quick fix.
For the electrum server and the lnd server I have no idea of how they are setup here. I know in general how they are done but if anything was tweaked / changed I would have to *gasp of horror* read the docs.

In general when doing something like this I prefer to do it cold to get a feel for how someone who has never done it before would see it.
Gives me a bit better feel.

So far I do like mynode for the most part. Everything works, decent performance, nice gui.
Not happy about the fact that the latest image for VM is way older then the latest version of the setup itself and the way to upgrade it without paying for the Premium version is a bit convoluted.

-Dave